


Middle

by orphan_account



Category: Shinhwa
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-13
Updated: 2017-01-24
Packaged: 2018-09-08 08:07:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 1,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8836945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: The passing days are tiring and perhaps a little meaningless, but you won’t have them any other way.





	1. i. semper ad meliora

It’s an hour when Seoul runs on soju cups and lamplights, and there’s a kind of stillness that sweeps into the room just as the final strains of elastic-rubber laughter are falling over deaf ears. Spread out on the round glass table are splayed chopsticks, crumpled napkins and several bowls of jajangmyeon, stained from heart to rim with black bean dregs and missionary disquietude.

Minwoo and Jun Jin had excused themselves hours ago on account of their schedules. Hyesung has been sleeping on the couch for a while now, his soundless breaths tickling the hem of your collar. It's late enough that your own schedule for the next day is in danger of imploding, but somehow you cannot bring yourself to fall asleep.

The threadbare jacket covering Hyesung is a miserable substitute for a blanket and you should wake him up and ask him to leave, but something of a cloying knot grows in your throat and instead you get up to fetch something with more thermal efficacy. When you return you find that Hyesung had shifted his position, taking up the entire couch. You know he’s a light sleeper so you’re careful not to wake him. The linen sheet fits perfectly around his shoulders, draped in slender acuity and hebetudinous grace, as if it’s right where it belongs.

As if it’s meant to be.


	2. ii. nec spe, nec metu

The thing about concert sets is that they're hollow cavities before the audience, endless expanses intimate and private yet so distant. Sometimes it is a routine, you’ve gone through all the movements so many times it’s second nature. Sometimes it’s a high, a rush of adrenaline before flashing lights, strobe images dancing between the cheer of the crowd and the strum of the synthetic bass. Sometimes it is a duty. You time your expressions to the fans’ reception, always remember to advertise for Dongwan’s latest drama or mention something about Jun Jin’s upcoming album.

Sometimes it is simply being, and the passing days are tiring and perhaps a little meaningless, but you won’t have them any other way.

Sometimes it is a revelation.

Being up there gives you a sense of displacement that makes you realize that even though there are six people on stage and several thousand below, you're actually alone. Perhaps everyone is alone, you think, and that’s how it always ever is.

But suddenly there’s a gentle hand on your shoulder to remind you that you’re on air, smile for the cameras, maybe something else, something between the arc of Shin Hyesung’s fingers and the crescent of your shoulder, and maybe it tells you yes, you’re alone but we’re together in our aloneness.

Sometimes it is a comet, a shooting star, with all the distance from the earth to fall, and all the skies of the world to illuminate.


	3. iii. in regione caecorum rex est luscus

It comes over you like a crashing wave, riding on tidal currents and tracksuit mornings stirred with coffee pot bitterness. It’s an odd sense of satisfaction that is drizzled in discursive fragility, twirls among afternoon vicissitudes and the graying leaves of October.

But not really. It’s contentment without fulfillment, saturation without wholeness, like some kind of achromatic vacuum is sucking you in. It’s a vortex with no way out, dollhouse domesticity with no plastic door exits. It’s the bone-aching chill of a rising breeze, sails the edge of a hidden horizon ready to dawn upon the universe.

It’s what it means to walk one-sixth of the way home, then stop because you’re lost and you don’t know what direction to latch onto. It’s running in a perfect unbroken circle, because cycles can’t be broken.

It’s finding yourself before a familiar door, a passcode you know better than your own. It’s deciding to ring the doorbell instead, and hoping, hoping for something to happen.

It’s knowing that no one’s inside, the resident’s schedule is stuffed with album recording sessions and dinner dates with friends. It’s knowing nothing will happen.

But it’s hoping anyway.


	4. iv. ab aeterno

Perhaps it's some inflated sense of self-worth, saddled by midday delusions and fermented desperation. Perhaps you're just getting older and you feel something is missing; everything is just the way it should be so why does it seem so wrong?

It grows on you in brief, quiet intervals like a weekend mold, withering under the telltale cadence of snowfall. It's winter now, and what’s left of the scarce daylight runs on Christmas decorations and foggy windows, nettled scarves and season’s greetings. You spend your time away from work cooped up in chicken and beer restaurants and internet cafés, counting the ridges of each passing snowflake.

Perhaps the last eighteen, nineteen years are just a surreal landscape, some drifting thought dusted in constellations and dreams, and a little of something else. Perhaps you've been asleep this whole time, perhaps you'll never wake up.

There is no album work, concert, program appearance, so you rarely see the members these days. The last evenings of December come in transient sidewalks and red bean soups. You catch a cold but it sweeps by, unnoticed, under the blinking red lights of rolling cameras, tall microphones.

Jun Jin sends in a coffee truck with a banner that wishes you success on your new drama. Andy you regularly talk to, only it’s over game chat rooms and messaging sites. Minwoo and Dongwan periodically invite you to lunch. Even though you’re dying to say yes, you usually decline because it conflicts with your itinerary and no matter how much you plead with your manager it’s little short of impossible.

As for Hyesung, they’re glimpses. Across the street, or through the spotted pane of the windshield. The distance of a thousand, thousand rungs, aged by the wines of futility. Flickering in the shadow of every unlit street lamp, between the phrases of every bedtime story, beneath every patterned rug, behind the darkness of shut eyelids. Between your lungs, squeezing, a little tighter each time.

Or perhaps they’re just fleeting images that disappear as soon as you try to hold onto them.


	5. v. caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt

When you think “I want to die” enough, it starts to automatically deluge your mind, playing like a broken record. It really doesn’t mean much; it really doesn’t mean anything. It’s almost soothing, the familiarity of it. Other thoughts flow along its current, submerged by its viscous eddies. Then, there's something—a gust of wind, a flush of colour upon the horizon; from the tenebrous sandbox an iteration surfaces, and you remember the meaning. There's a mundane sheen to it, reared by social periphery, anointed by grotesque hilarity, castrated by human philosophy. You wait for it to go back to meaning nothing, but it's already settled in the riverbanks, an unprepossessing sediment inhabiting overcast shores. The echoes of its haunts slowly erode from the limpid strains of the tides of time, waiting for the still waters to inundate the land once more.

It's with the chimerical tenor of a child's naïveté that this portentous brook rudely splashes into your conscience, claiming the stream of your thoughts as its own.

“I want to die,” you say, abruptly interrupting Minwoo’s explanation of the track listing.

Jun Jin gives you a worried look. “Are you tired, hyung?”

Hyesung laughs. You can barely contain yourself with the caustic demands of social grace watching him laugh. You feel the corners of your own lips tug upward, automatically, a little too high. Your smirk doesn’t go unnoticed. “Eric’s just being weird again. He doesn’t mean it. Right, Eric?”

No, you don’t mean it. You echo it aloud to reassure the others, because Dongwan looks ready to call suicide prevention on you. You don’t mean it, just like how you don’t mean almost anything you ever say.

Still, not meaning it doesn’t stop it from coming to you at night, when you are swathed in your favorite blue blanket and petting Gomdori to sleep. It’s the last thing you think before your consciousness fades into a dreamless slumber.


	6. vi. non nobis solum nati sumus

“I love you, Eric.” He says it once. Under the influence. He says it to Jun Jin, too. And Minwoo, Andy, Dongwan.

“I love you” doesn't mean much these days. It's the same as thank you, sorry, pass me the salt. It's a billboard tagline, garden variety phrase. Society is surfeited with the term and it has saturated every roof tile and pipeline beneath a glossy neon tint.

Things like “I love you” and “I will remember you forever” are as fleeting as the passing wind, every prism a facetious glow, every angle of intent sawed off until all you have left is a circle of light, luminous, pale, like a candle flame over the surface of water, or the cold winter moon overhead. You won't be remembered forever. You'll be forgotten, little by little, until all that's left is an echo of melancholy.

You think maybe if you don't see Hyesung’s face as often as you do, you'll forget that, too. Little by little, it'll crumble, fade. You feel as if you've already forgotten important things, every existing memory tarnished with the salt of corrosive sweat. 

Perhaps the most important memories have already eroded away, and every time you stretch toward them in longing they elude you. You plunge yourself into the seafoam but you can't find them, they continue to recede from your fingers, but that's no matter, you'll continue to sift through every grain of sand on this infinite beach until--

And even if he means it, even if it isn't “I love you,” even if it's I love you...

You know better. There is more than one way to love.


	7. vii. e causa ignota

You're a careful person. You smoke but not too much, you know precisely how many packs you've bought between now and the end of last month. You know what the cameras ask for. Charismatic expression, neighbourhood ahjussi smile, calculated façade. Sometimes, though, you're caught by in-betweens. Three Meals a Day zoom-in on a blank, thoughtful stare, written off with the 4D idol label. Netizen comments are always on your side, because you're a careful person.

You're a careful person. You let people get close. You let some people into your heart, so, so far inward that they've reached something, some petrified amber of your soul grazed by smiles, gestures. The waning half-moon eyes of Lee Minwoo. The ever-cheerful disposition of Kim Dongwan. The subtle maturity of Lee Sunho. The roaring laughter of Park Choongjae. But you're careful, ever so careful. Grazing the surface is grazing the surface.

You're a careful person, so how could you have allowed those slim, pale fingers grab onto it? Squeeze it until it cracks, hollow at the core, echoing into receding memories and beyond, so deeply, irreversibly?

You're a careful person, but you break a vase on your foot. On purpose or by accident, you aren't sure.

"How did you hurt your ankle?" Hyesung asks the next day.

You tell him you tripped over the curb.


End file.
